I thought I was a space alien, but it turns out I was only a Unitarian Universalist.
This weekend, I did something unexpected. I rejoined the local UU congregation – yes, the same one where I experienced a wee bit of drama a good 16 years ago related to a television and some coffee hour shenanigans. I didn’t know how to rejoin, officially: After all, I had been a member and gone through the classes all those years ago. My signature is presumably still in the book up front, somewhere, in my utterly illegible scrawl.
But how do you come back to something after a decade and a half? Anti-climactic conclusion: It just takes a pleasant phone call.
And, prior to that, a friendly conversation at a music event with an acquaintance who is a member of the church. And an official apology after 16 years, signed with kindness by seven different people. And just … coming back to services, mostly in person, sometimes online.
And finding my place there, philosophically speaking.
The apology touched me deeply, because we live in a hyper-competitive society that shies from admitting mistakes and making amends. When ambivalent people offer apologies, they typically include a heavy top-coat of justification: “I’m sorry, but.” Or, “I’m sorry you felt that way.”
This wasn’t ambivalent at all, nor was it fancy. It was simply: I’m writing to apologize for your bad experience of our congregation’s behavior around the TV and the auction. That was absolutely not our finest hour. I sat with that card for a long time, just staring at it with glassy eyes.
Why do authentic apologies matter so much? They affirm our personhood, the sense that we and our experiences actually matter. They return a measure of power to us, in the aftermath of situations where we felt powerless. To use a concept from Starhawk, they affirm power-with rather that power-over.
Truth be told, I probably would have returned even without the apology, although that sealed the deal. I started exploring CUUPS again prior to the pandemic and felt myself drawn back when a congregation member spoke about the church as a whole.
The fact is: All the ecofeminism stuff that I write here in my blog – all the screeds about creating partnership society, all those gooey posts about love – are the exact sorts of things they chat about in the UU every week. Unitarian Universalism is a non-credal religion (i.e., not based on belief) focused on making love visible in the world.
Sound like anyone you know?
Unitarian Universalism is also a both/and sort of path: Most of us (look at me! I’m part of an “us” now) are both Unitarian Universalists and something else. A UU Pagan. A UU Christian. A UU humanist. This past Sunday, I saw another UU Druid sitting a few rows back.
There’s a proverb that is attributed willy-nilly to pretty much every region of Asia, but I am going to go with the version from the Japanese Zen monk Ikkyu: “Many paths lead from the foot of the mountain, but at the peak we all gaze at the single bright moon.” Unitarian Universalism lives this philosophy.
It probably seems wishy-washy to a lot of people who feel more comfortable with rules, definitions and unquestioned legacies from the ancients: “if NPR was a religion,” as the joke goes. The Prairie Home Companion had a good joke about UUs: “Unitarian Universalist Bible Study! Bring your Bible and a pair of scissors.”
To which I say: About damn time. Just because some conference of bishops decided 1,500 years ago that this collection of ancient texts was the “word of God” doesn’t make it so. The world would be a lot better off if people did come at the Bible with scissors, and cut out all the parts advocating slavery, genocide and beating your children with sticks, to name a few items. But I digress.
Unitarian Universalism is about love, questioning and shared experience, and not belief. And I came to recognize that I belong there, just as I belong in Pagandom.
It took a long time to realize that, though. I’ll let author Jhumpa Lahiri explain it for me because she’s better with words: The essential dilemma of my life is between my deep desire to belong and my suspicion of belonging.
The problem with the pack is they have a lot of teeth.
“You don’t run with pack.”
I still turn those words over in my mind, weathering their harsh edges.
The scene: A (non-UU) Pagan community, where I was met with a barbed-wire carpet. Go the fuck back to Jersey. After a half-ass effort of trying to make it work over a few years, I shrugged and left – but complete rejection always stings, even when it’s expected, even when it’s not really about you but what you represent.
I remember kneeling in front of people who despised me, who made no secret of despising me. My eccentric little mission: to give an actual gift, absolutely no strings attached. Seriously. I had a very nice beadwork shirt to rehome, and someone – probably testing my mettle and/or stirring up a cauldron of trouble – had suggested that they might like it.
They wouldn’t acknowledge or look at me. Minutes ticked by as I knelt on the summer grass.
Finally, resigned to the fact that I wasn’t going away, they looked at me. I gave my gift with some haltingly polite words, rose and walked away.
I didn’t win their friendship or esteem with that gift, or my long kneeling. In fact, said parties detest me to this day, and one made a public show of that in a completely different setting years later. But just because they hate me doesn’t mean that I hate them — quite the opposite, actually, even though I have no particular desire to be in fellowship with them. They rejected me; I didn’t reject them.
After leaving that community, I had a conversation with one of its members, sharp-edged but well-meaning (I think). You don’t run with pack. If I were to translate the sentiment, maybe it would be something like: You obviously don’t give a remote-controlled flying fuck about what people think about you, considering how you act in the world, so why does rejection bother you?
Because I am a human being, folks. And every single one of us has a yearning to belong.
The heart of the word “belong” is obviously the verb long, which means “to yearn.” It comes from good Germanic stock, *langa, and is connected with the other kind of “long” – having a great linear extent. I think the overall metaphor is stretching ourselves outward toward desire, long and thin, like pulled taffy.
Human beings – near-relatives to bonobos – aren’t mighty creatures. We lack the claws and jaws of tigers, the ferocity of sharks, the speed of horses or gazelles. Chimpanzees are half our size and can literally rip us in half; do not get in a wrestling match with a chimp.
What saved us as a species was our belonging: As social mammals, we guard and care for one another. Smarts are important, too, but cooperation is arguably even more important.
Our society, built on hyper-individualism, domination and capitalism, considers the “self-made man” as the ideal: someone who needs absolutely no one and can go it alone with aplomb. All that is Marlboro Man marketing and not real at all. (Perhaps it’s worth pointing out that five of the actors who played the Marlboro Man ended up dying from lung cancer, so this is not a healthy model on multiple fronts.)
Cowboy mythology aside, social isolation has been linked to serious health risks, both mental and physical. Loneliness can scythe through our lifespan in a ton of ways – including the increasing amount of “deaths of despair” seen in news coverage of recent years.
A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick. – Brené Brown
There is something innate in us that stretches out a palm to our fellow monkeys, in asking and invitation. And while people might smack that palm away, it doesn’t erase the fact of that need, that sheer drive to love and be loved.
Wolves aren’t what you think they are and neither are people.
What does “running with pack” mean? The word that comes to mind is groupthink, as well as common misconceptions about how wolf packs operate. You have the dominant leaders, who set the rules and customs; the submissive pack interprets every flick of tail and wheels at their subtle command.
We have a dominator culture, so this is seen as normative. Pack demands a kind of conformity and refusing to adhere to this conformity in word or deed, even thought, is seen as a dastardly affront. You find this in liberal communities as well as conservative ones because we all grow up in relation to the same dominator-defined uber-culture.
All too often, even consensus situations replicate the domination/submission dyad because it’s largely unconscious; in fact, I would argue that consensus situations – in my experience – seem particularly prone to vicious iterations of this. Elected democracies have their own set of messy problems, but at least the lines of power and the systems of decision-making are more clearly acknowledged and defined.
Outside of professional contexts, I am an absolute nightmare in situations that involve behind-the-scenes power-wrangling or respecting implied hierarchies. Situations that require me to be something other than myself for more than a brief, context-specific period of time are guaranteed to land me in the pit of despair.
And I am not being dramatic. There is something truly corrosive about constantly reading the room, adapting to others’ perceptions, and containing every shred of your individuality like it’s radiation in a nuclear power plant. Every single time I’ve done this at length has sunk me in dangerous levels of despair. (“Depression” seems too mild of a word here.) Sure, you make other people comfortable, but you do it at the cost of utterly erasing yourself.
But comfort isn’t our birthright in this world, so I’ve given up on the idea that I need to make people comfortable in anything other than a good host sort of way. Yeah, some people will be offended by that, but they’ll get over the lumps and bumps. I’m more than willing to meet genuine need and even desire (provided that it’s mutual-flourishing-amenable), but not at the cost of erasing myself.
Because I am quote-happy today, here’s another: I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird. – Frank Zappa
And yeah, I get it. I have the social skills of a four-year-old: enthusiastic and strange, attracted by shiny, speaking unvarnished and often uncomfortable truth, not with the intention to wound but because, like, duh, it’s truth! I literally tell people “I value your friendship!” and mean it, even though it makes them super-uncomfortable because cool kids don’t say shit like that. And, well, the pop-culture wisdom in this particular iteration of end-stage capitalism is that we’re only supposed to love spouses and blood-family.
Four-year-olds are apt to throw their arms around everyone for a genuine hug and given them stickers and toys. So am I, except I am more likely to give you the gloves off my hands (even though they’re my absolute favorites), pay for your cat’s surgery, or give you a lovely beaded shirt even though you hate my guts just because you might like it. Totally off-putting but largely well-meaning, although I have my cranky moments.
Let go back to quote-land! You’re imperfect, and you’re wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging. – Brené Brown
You are, I am, we all are. We are bonobos. We are made for love.
Wiggle-butt
The last time I wrote about the UU, I mused about making my own welcome – a tiny bit of imbas forosnai that seeped into my consciousness.
As it turns out, that’s exactly what I did. Maybe, just like Dorothy with the ruby slippers, I had the power to find my home all along. Or Shevek with the wall he unbuilds: Sometimes you need to walk away, but sometimes you need to challenge community when it gets into unhealthy patterns, or makes a boneheaded mistake. We all make mistakes, right?
I’ve done variants of this earlier with the theo school and the university chaplain, but maybe I didn’t go far enough, wasn’t committed enough to the work of love. I didn’t know enough back then about love and rebellion. I didn’t know enough to kneel in the grass.
The trick isn’t to fight for pride of place. That reinforces the dominator dynamic, the centrality of violence.
The trick is to wag your tail and just be yourself. To kneel in the grass and refuse to hate. To never let the soreheads define you, but leave the temple gates open for them. To step through those gates when they open for you.
To belong, we must first stretch out our hand – and then clasp the hand that reaches back.
White Cat Grove 
“ON BELONGING: WHEN THE DOOR SHUTS, YOU CAN OPEN IT AGAIN. THAT’S HOW DOORS WORK. ”
I Absolutely LOVE This Post!
BRAVO!
Bellissimo!